We don’t necessarily flaunt these facts because we’re proud of our delinquency; we do it because the confessions represent our only milestones and emotional investments as of yet. They are the only way we can think to distinguish ourselves. None of us have jobs or degrees. Many of us still live in the cities where we were born, with the families to whom we were supernaturally assigned. Without our dirty little accolades, we are the same sex, the same age, the same kind. In the dorm, we sleep in identical beds, in identical rooms, like rows of saplings staked in a nursery. THE PARTY itself would not be memorable if it was not our first. At the back door we pay five dollars for red plastic cups, the big ones that I guess were manufactured for the sole purpose of serving alcohol because I can’t imagine why anyone would want to drink that much of anything else. The keg is in the basement, where the music is muffled from public-safety officers who patrol the avenue on their weekend rounds. In the coming months, I will learn that the drains in the foundations make beer-sticky floors easier to hose down. The ceiling is outlined with strands of Christmas lights, which in college will qualify as atmosphere.
We each drink three beers.
The boldness that Bud Light sends rolling back to me is just what I’ve been missing the past few days. When I talk to Tess, thoughts diffuse through me without any of the hesitation that so often trips me up. I speak without rehearsing the words in my head beforehand, and she listens, clapping her hands and agreeing with her whole heart. When I laugh, the hum of my own happiness is astonishing.
By my fourth cup, I have decided to sit on the basement’s washing machine in order to escape the brush of too many bodies hurling for a space around the keg. Nearly a hundred freshmen who, in this first week, are overcome by the novelty of a five-dollar beer binge, have crammed themselves into the confines of the basement’s concrete walls. The air is as moist and misted as it is in the dorm showers.
I am planning a path through the bodies to the bathroom when the basement lights blow out like candles. In the absence of music, the three boys who live here appear in the doorway with flashlights to say, “We’ve blown a fuse. Everyone has to go. Everyone has to go now.” And I follow the throng of people that inches up the basement stairs, by the light of Tess’s cigarette lighter, which she holds up like someone at a concert expecting an encore.
Outside the street is blind dark: no house lights, no headlights, streetlights that I only notice now in their powerlessness. The three miles back to the dorm is a spun-out shadow. There is a drop of rain and then two, and then water plummets from the sky like an overturned bucket, soaking us through. The sky claps and ignites deep purple. Far off, I hear a sound like a chain saw cutting through wood. Branches break themselves off tree trunks. Garbage cans wheel themselves down the street.
After a few beers, I am usually only mildly tipped. But this time, I feel deeply drunk, like I’m in a free-fall. I am Dorothy snapped up by the tornado, and the Wicked Witch is whizzing by on a stick. I inch forward, huddling together with Wendi and Tess, and it’s almost fun. The gusts of wind that drive against my back feel violent enough to launch me into orbit.
When we finally pull open the dorm’s front door, all three hundred residents are crouched on the floor of the lobby. A few people are praying.
Beer is still pushing into my system, and the feeling is powerful and fluid, like a river emptying itself into an ocean. Under its ether, I am insensitive to panic. My head is the quietest it has been in months. I sit cross-legged on the floor, with my back to the broad wall of student mailboxes, and let Tess lean her head against my shoulder. She is crying, and I put one hand on her rain-soaked pant leg, to tell her it is going to be okay.
The world outside is bust, but I have been salvaged. From the junk of my character, I have pieced together some courage to pull around me. I feel like a quilt made from scraps.
THE LOCAL newspapers call it a microburst, a cold Canadian air mass that rolled into a slack system of hot summer air. They say fall met summer with a bang. The world outside my window is a mess of live wires, toppled steeples, overturned tractor trailers, and twisted highway signs. On TV, reporters interview a succession of victims, one person whose chimney collapsed on her leg, another whose toolshed blew through a McDonald’s. Roofs are blown off campus apartments, and six hundred students are homeless.
The university takes four days to clean up the wreckage. With classes canceled, we take the four-day weekend to recover and booze.
The long weekend is an unexpected delight. It is the collegiate version of a snow day, which we will never be granted at S.U. because it snows every day. I am thrilled by the idea of spending nights drinking with Tess in our dorm rooms, and days recuperating in flannel pajamas, eating sugary cereal and watching Jenny Jones reform girls like me.
As the semester progresses, I will come to depend on this cycle. A rhythm will come to pass, whereby afternoon classes will unroll into evenings of swilling cups over card games, singing along to records, and barreling down the hallways of the dorm until I stub a toe or run out of breath. Then evenings will unroll into mornings, to ear ringing, nausea, and hard-sleeping afternoons.
Drinking, which was once a novelty, will become the usual. Its repetition will structure my days once I realize that college, which looked like a premier destination in high school, is just another static period of time biding. Drinking will give college a circular configuration, like a holding pattern I can navigate while I await clearance in the real world.
My class schedule accommodates the cycle of my drinking. Monday through Thursday, I have Spanish class at 8:30 A.M., which is a ghastly hour, but allows for no classes on Friday. In the coming semesters, I will learn to design my schedules with this aim in mind. I will comb the course catalog exhaustively, weighing my requirements, trying this and that combination of classes. I will happily have four, even five, ninety-minute lectures in one day if it frees up another day for pure, unadulterated slothfulness. My craftiest friends will devise hangover-free schedules, meaning no classes before 11 A.M. and fixed four-day weekends.
Tess has Fridays off, too, and together we start our weekends on Thursday nights. Tess has a friend, an older boy she knows from home, who buys us wine coolers at the One Stop convenience store. We drink the way Jana instructed us: In Tess’s room, behind a locked door, we sit opposite one another on the carpet, hands curled around full bottles of hard lemonade, ashing our cigarettes into empty bottles of sparkling pineapple breeze. Halfway through a bottle of the sweet stuff I feel a headache coming on. After one, I chatter maniacally. After two, Tess tells me to keep my voice down; I am yelling bloody murder.
Sometimes, when the mini-mart runs out of Wild Island wine coolers, Tess’s friend buys us tallboys of beer, and we attempt what Tess calls “power hour,” which is doing a single shot of beer every minute for one hour. We usually last only thirty minutes, after which we are cockeyed and burping like sailors.
In those first few months, getting drunk is the real amusement. Like a road trip to some arbitrary place, the real fun takes place along the way, and once we get there, there is nothing to do. We usually get drunk and push bottle caps into the ceiling panels in an effort to fill every square inch, making a roof we can sleep under, the way some girls adhere glow-in-the-dark star stickers. Some nights, we get drunk and sit on the concrete ledge outside our dorm windows, where we can listen to the booming sounds of trucks on the highway overpass. Others, we ride the elevator to the second floor, where the boys buy cigarettes by the carton, or to the seventh floor, where the boys drink Aftershock and Slip N’ Slide in the hall.
A big night consists of getting drunk and stealing a couch from the dorm lobby while the security guard is outside on his cigarette break. Tess is too unsteady on her feet to carry her end, and we strip the paint off the walls in a futile attempt to jam the length of it into her dorm room.
THOUGH OUR Thursday nights are uneventful, they make my roommate distinctly jealous.
When Tess and
I perform our cigarettes/wine coolers routine, Wendi shuts herself in the lounge alone, cracking pistachios, flipping pages in a notebook, and watching Change of Heart on the fingerprint-flecked TV screen. Occasionally she’ll appear in Tess’s doorway to see what we’re up to (her knocks always send us into a fury of window opening and bottle hiding), the way a babysitter might check up on her charges only to find them engrossed in a game she can’t fully understand. Her smile shivers, and she says, “You girls are insane,” before she swivels like a jewelry-box figure and leaves.
In the beginning, it never occurs to me that my drinking might bother her. After all, I don’t drink with her, or even near her. I don’t look at her with bloodshot eyes or breathe on her with musty breath, and I never bring bottles into our room. For that matter, I’ve never been loaded enough to say anything mean to her face. (Which is not to say I don’t think mean things; later, my mom will remind me that I referred to my room as “theater of the absurd,” and to my roommate as “an acting major bound for big roles in low-budget porn.”)
Three-quarters of students may report having bad experiences due to someone else’s drinking;* but from where I stand, Wendi isn’t one of them. On the nights that I don’t drift off to sleep on the inflatable armchair in Tess’s room, I don’t even flip the light switch when I come in. I feel through my drawers in the dark and change clothes quietly, so as not to wake her.
Later, I will realize that what I see as self-sufficiency, Wendi sees as exclusivity. At first, I don’t think my drinking concerns her so much as it makes her feel rejected. Wendi, who has had little experience drinking before college, is just now learning that alcohol is the tie that binds. I think she’s envious of the way that drinking allies Tess and me. It secures our bull sessions, capers, and absurd inside jokes.
Wendi could join us, of course. We have certainly invited her. But every time, she says no, on account of a Friday-morning theater history class. But the excuse isn’t ironclad; she could go to class hungover, the way Tess and I sometimes do, in sweatpants and a ponytail, hands trembling, eighteen-ounce cup of coffee like a paperweight on the desk.
Her inexperience, I think, keeps her at bay. The following year, the university will release an alcohol- and drug-use survey of more than three hundred students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, and more than half will say we began using alcohol sometime between ages fourteen and seventeen. Wendi is in the other half. She got drunk once in high school, which I suspect is like having sex once in high school: You don’t enjoy it the first time, you endure it.
However, there is one area in which Wendi’s experience surpasses my own: men. Wendi has had sex, and she knows that I haven’t, and soon enough she is lolling in Tess’s room on Thursday nights, bent over the pages of Cosmopolitan, discussing It: getting It, getting into It, the best way to have It standing up.
Her maneuver works. Tess, who has a twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend, prefers sex talk with Wendi to drinking with me, a partiality that seems almost illogical, in the same way that in the game “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” paper wins out over rock. After all, sex talk is just talk, whereas power hour is brute action.
I shrink away from our competitive little threesome, regardless, and chalk up the loss to a fascination that just doesn’t serve me.
AS A TESTAMENT to my uninterest in sex, I decide to break up with Reed.
Sometime in October, Reed decides he can’t see enough of me, and every few days I get an unexpected ring from the dorm security guard, saying I have a visitor and could I come sign him in? Most often, I feel too guilty to send him home after his five-hour drive, so I let him sleep over despite the fact his mere presence breaks the continuity of my drinking cycle. I let Reed cocoon on the floor in his Polar Shield sleeping bag even though his shadow makes Wendi sigh and huff.
To complicate matters, I spent a Saturday night drinking Durango tequila with a boy from the eleventh floor and kissing him on the tall steps outside the law building, which is the only height on campus from which the city looks pretty, where the lights of Crouse Hospital carpet the incline like bits of glittering glass. I don’t know whether it was the height, or the buzz, or the disorientation that came with having a strange boy’s hands cup my cheeks, but my head was filled with a whirling sensation like I was about to fall. I’d sobbed on the spot for being a lousy cheat.
For months, I’ve known about the rumor that most high school relationships end by Thanksgiving of freshman year. It is a warning as old as the “freshman fifteen,” and probably far more imminent. It is much easier to keep fifteen pounds off your ass than it is to keep your interest in someone else’s when it’s six hours and four hundred miles away.
By Christmas of second semester, almost every girl on my floor unleashes her high school beau for one of two reasons: The breakups are either reactionary or cautionary. The girls have either been drunk and adulterous, or they can’t trust that they won’t be. One tells me early on a Saturday morning, while doing shots of Jim Beam with some film major she just met, somebody else rolling a joint, and time spinning by like a bicycle, that she couldn’t be loyal to anything except the song on the stereo, the first down comforter that bulldozed her under, the cool glass of water in the morning that tamed her cotton-mouthed throat. She couldn’t be faithful to one man. This is college, after all. At a house party, you can’t wait in line for the toilet without some doll-faced boy leaning in to try to kiss you.
I can’t even last until Christmas. It is during Reed’s next surprise visit that I decide to break things off with him. Tess and I sit in the dorm bathroom, drinking glasses of Zima she’s stirred with cubes of hard candy to infuse the drinks with a sour-apple taste. For a half hour we sit and drink, while Reed waits in my room, Tess snubs cigarettes out in the drain, and I drum my feet against the side of the bathtub and rehearse what I’m going to say. Only after the tart-flavored malt warms my insides do I emerge and say, “Reed, we need to talk.”
ONE NIGHT, at a house party being thrown by one of the university’s sports teams, I meet a gymnast named Hannah, who persuades me to try out for the cheerleading team. We are sitting at the kitchen’s beige plastic patio table, holding cups of viciously yellow beer and blowing smoke in each other’s faces, and she is sweetly telling me what to expect: the audition space, the judges, and the stunts I would need to knock off.
Maybe it’s the beer bubbling through me, but as Hannah speaks, I forget to be indifferent. I drop the brooding face that college has given me the freedom to wear openly, now that my mother isn’t around to remind me to smile. The sullenness I disguise as artistic sensibility gives way, and I let Hannah convince me. She assures me that my height-to-weight ratio will make me easily throwable.
The next weekend, I drag myself to Archbold Gym, almost as a test to myself, the way people joke that the best way to curb your drinking is to follow through with the promises you make when you’re drunk. Inside, the high-vaulted room is full of hopefuls, stripped down to their sports bras, orange stars glued to their cheeks.
The coach pairs us off, one girl and one guy. I’m assigned to a big fellow named Joe, a veteran. He holds me tight around the waist and says, “Stay straight as an arrow,” before tossing me skyward and grabbing hold of my heels. Standing upright in his hands, I don’t dare draw a breath, afraid to lose the inner lightness I never knew I possessed. When it’s time for the gymnastics portion I tell Joe I can’t manage the compulsory back tuck, and he says, “Don’t worry, just jump and tuck your knees to your chest.” I do exactly that, while Joe launches me backward into orbit and then catches me like a fly ball to left field.
When I make the team it’s like winning the grand prize for acclimation. As my prize I am awarded a cheek-grazing skirt, an orange ribbon for my hair, and plastic pom-poms that shed like the dickens. I have regular five-second appearances on ESPN, clapping and smiling into the lens ’til the cameraman says, “And we’re out.” My mother puts a notice in the local paper. People I knew in high school e
mail to say they saw me on TV during a game against Rutgers. By all appearances, I am a bona fide student athlete, earning college credit and everything. At football games, boys I’ve never met before lean over the field gate and ask for my phone number.
Privately, I feel like a phony. “Cheerleader” is a title that fast becomes a metaphor for the girl I have always tried to be, and miserably failed. On the green rubber turf of the Carrier Dome, I just can’t yell loud enough. I can’t smile wide enough. Without a buzz streaming through my system, I can’t laugh off a fall from Joe’s shoulders. I can’t drum up the obligatory level of optimism.
My days course into a stream of classes followed by team practices, weight-room training, and one-on-one practices with Joe. I dread doing stunts. My stomach churns for hours before I climb onto a pyramid that’s three people high, before the coach makes me stand in the hands of two girls who are standing on the shoulders of two guys. The view from the top is appalling, and my nervous ankles can’t quit shaking. I spend hours in the gymnastics room, practicing back flips that I can’t seem to master, slapping my head over and over into the blue crash mat, unleashing a string of fuck, shit, fucks. I am twitchy and sleep deprived. Weight falls off me.
The only thing that eases me through the bruises from my misfired back tucks is the promise of drinking with my teammates after practice. I don’t think this is avant-garde, mainly because it’s not. Roughly half of college athletes, both male and female, are binge drinkers, and a 2001 study by the NCAA found that 80 percent of college athletes drink.
At S.U., the sports teams throw the most desirable weekend parties. People pack shoulder to shoulder into a basketball player’s South Campus apartment, until the air inside is more humid than the gym’s treadmill room and an overflow of bodies spills out through the sliding glass door and into the trodden backyard. At these parties, there are all varieties of groupies and leeches, and players move from room to room with an entourage as daunting as any tabloid star’s.
Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Page 12
